The Long Sleep

XVII

The longer he stared at the ancient note and the more he tried to make sense of it, the less clear it became. If he had written this himself, he had done it decades ago — at least fifty years ago, judging from the condition of the paper. And how was that possible, when he was not even thirty years old? The pods? Furthermore, if he had been this way, why couldn't he remember it? If the intent of Henry Galing's deceptions was not sinister, why did he have this gut-level fear, this sense of impending disaster? And having taken the time to write this note to himself, why had he not explained to himself the circumstances behind this charade?

Finally, he folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and went back to the middle of the street. The discovery of the fifty-year-old message had contributed to his sense of urgency. He didn't have any time to waste.

He studied the gray wall where there had once been a long tree-lined avenue, houses, a redlight, a moving car. Now that the two hologram projectors had been smashed, the only thing of interest about the smooth cement was a door which the film clip had concealed. It was the same ugly gray shade as the walls. It had formidable stainless steel fittings and was devoid of warning signs, directions, and other labels.

Perhaps the very anonymity of it was what made it so intriguing. He went to it and tried the knob.

The door was unlocked, and it swung open silently.

He looked back along the street down which he'd just come. No sign of Galing.

He stepped out of the street into a corridor that was more than sixty feet long. Eight, closed elevators stood on each side, and the long hall ended in a set of bright yellow doors…

He let the gray door behind him close quietly on the artificial residential street. Since he now suspected that his adventures had all taken place within a single building, the elevators were of great interest to him. With those he could more fully explore this place and learn the nature of it. Once that was done, it would be a simple matter to deduce the reasoning behind this program and his purpose in behind here.

Or at least he hoped it would be simple. In the last few days he had learned not to count on anything.

Although he was extremely pleased to find the elevators, he was more interested in those two yellow doors. Hesitantly, he walked down to them, pushed them open, and found the same long corridor into which he had first come when he had left the storm drains after escaping from that dungeon and from the murderous vegetation in the tunnels. At the far end was the six-foot pressure hatch that guarded the observation chamber. The computer display screen in the wall beside it was dark. He remembered the metal-walled room, the foot-thick glass window that looked out upon—

Upon what?

He had not actually forgotten what lay beyond that window; the memory had merely been suppressed, not erased. He had passed out in front of the deep glass, had been found and taken back to Henry Galing's mansion where he was fed that story about sybocylacose-46. He was aware now that the entire sybocylacose fantasy and — by logical extension — all the scenes that had come before it had been invented for a single purpose: to make him forget what lay beyond the observation room window.

He stepped on the metal grid in the corridor floor before the pressure hatch, and he looked at the display screen as it turned a restful blue.

He put both hands on the steel wheel in the center of the door and wrestled it clockwise as far as it would go. The door remained locked, but the message on the display screen changed.

What lay beyond that gargantuan slab of glass? What was it that would want to breach the view chamber and, having breached it, would pose such a danger that the pressure hatch was required to protect the rest of the building.

He waited.

The green light came on overhead.

As soon as it popped its seal, he opened the enormous hatch and went into the room beyond.

Forty feet away, at the other end of the observation chamber, a muddy gray light pulsed dimly. Regardless of its source, even the light itself was ugly, frightening. It carried death within its bleak rays.

He began to shake.

He took one step toward the window and stopped.

He felt sick on his stomach.

Gasping, he turned suddenly and ran out of that place without taking a look at the smoke veiled thing beyond the glass. He pushed the hatch shut, watched the wheel whirl automatically into position.

The green light flicked off.

The display screen went black.

Leaning against the hatch, Joel let his breath out in a long shudder of relief. He had nearly made a fatal error. If he had gone to that window again, he felt sure that he would have fainted just as he had done the last time. He was no more prepared for this thing, whatever the hell it was, than he had been previously. He would have suffered another trauma and fainted. Sooner or later Henry Galing would have found him, and then he'd have awakened in yet another lie, right back on square number one.

This the rat learned when it ran the maze: don't make the same mistake twice.

He went back through the yellow doors and studied the floor indicators above the elavtors, Fourteen of the lifts served only the fourth to the eighteenth floors. The other two went to the bottom of the building. One of these was not working. He summoned the functioning cage, stepped into it, punched the button for the bottom level, watched the door close, and went down.

He came out of the elevator into the familiar hallway that led to the pod chamber observation deck. The narrow room, where he stood in the center of it, was as he had first seen it: black command chairs, purple lightstrips, computer consoles, file cabinets, the lockers with names stenciled on them.

Only the age-lain blanket of dust had changed. Galing and his men had cleaned off the chairs and the computer consoles; and the dust on the floor was marred by many footprints, those made when they had tried to fool him with the aquamen.

He went to the nearest window and looked into the adjoining room where the life support pods stood, dust-filmed.

They were real!

When he was expelled from that pod, he was thrust into reality, no matter how bitter and inexplicable it seemed. The world was not hobbling hopelessly in a stream of universal chaos; it was immutable, waiting to be explored and understood. But from the moment the faceless man touched him, he had been living in Galing's illusions. Now, once again back to reality, he set out to explore this eighteen-level structure, anxious to learn all that he could.

He hurried, though he wanted to give himself a chance to notice every detail, to find anything that might enlighten him. He could not forget that Galing's crew still held Allison as a hostage.